Measles and the Unvaccinated

Unvaccinated children are being sent home from school. Their parents are being excoriated in the press for putting everyone else at risk. Implicit in this is the suspicion that the vaccines don't really work all that well. Actually no one claims they always work, just most of the time. CDC says the current measles outbreak in the United States is occurring mostly among the unvaccinated. I'm sure they know what the numbers are but they aren't saying, odd from an agency that loves to cite their numbers. My grandson is thirteen now and has autism, not Alzheimer's, autism. I don't know what caused it and it should come as no surprise that I follow the news on the subject. The medical community has no credible answer. I suspect the vaccines. A lot of other people do too, especially well educated mothers with the resources to do their own research and a predisposition to challenge authorities who dismiss their concerns out of hand. We are told that study after study has rejected any connection but no one can point to solid research that supports that rejection. The CDC, all over the Ebola outbreak, refuses to even look at a comparison of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children. They say it would be unethical, that no suitable population exists. But that doesn't really wash and serves to heightens the suspicion. It's a simple question. Are unvaccinated children less likely to have autism? Why don't they want to answer? Are they hiding something? If they want to know why more and more mothers are rejecting vaccines, or the compressed recommended schedule, or multiple simultaneous vaccinations, or flu shots containing mercury, they have to look no further. No wonder people are suspicious. News reports on the measles outbreak regularly reference a "now discredited' 1998 paper published in Lancet claiming autism was caused by the combined Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine. I read the paper. It made no such claim. A team of scientists did find that twelve children with Pervasive Development Disorder also had the measles virus in their guts and recommended further research. Correlation does not equal causation but at a press conference announcing the results the principle author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, commented that if it were his child, until more is known he would get the measles, mumps, and rubella shots separately, an option available at the time in the UK where the research was done. Dr. Wakefield was subsequently accused of fraud, conflict of interest, and unethical clinical practice in conducting the research, and hounded out of medicine. His real crime was suggesting MMR might be implicated. Lancet eventually retracted the paper. No subsequent research has replicated the findings. Few researchers who value their medical licenses would. Dr. Wakefield continues to defend his work and the paper. Mothers who look seriously into this smell a hatchet job. The separate shot option was withdrawn in the UK soon after the Lancet paper was published and now is apparently unavailable anywhere. It is MMR or nothing. More and more mothers are choosing nothing. That isn't likely to change until authorities come up with a convincing explanation for the exploding incidence of autism. Explaining it away as genetic or better diagnosis isn't going to work. Neither will another bogus study claiming we don't know what causes it but it isn't vaccines. If it isn't vaccines then what is it? If it is vaccines come clean. Let's start talking about how to make them safer and more efficacious. Until then I will remain suspicious. So will a lot of like minded people. And if measles has returned to the United States I don't blame the parents of unvaccinated children. I blame the medical community,